for their lives, Hawke knew. They were fighting for the very soul of their country. And they were fighting in the memory of their fathers, their mothers, their sisters, their brothers, all victims of the vicious Taliban jihadists.
Hawke believed he could ask for no finer men than those who fought at his side.
Stokely had taken to firing RPGs into the ground in the midst of the charging Taliban horses. His objective, Hawke saw, was not only to take out the horses, but to create large craters with the exploding grenades. This caused a great many of the horses to stumble when the unexpected hole appeared suddenly, and they went down, throwing their riders to the ground and making them much easier targets.
'Where the hell'd you learn that, Stoke?' Hawke shouted over the deafening roar of gunfire.
'I didn't,' Stoke said. 'I just made it up.'
Hawke laughed and took out a large number of fighters who were stumbling around looking for their AKs after being thrown from their mounts. Some of the militia fighters had seen what Stokely was doing and began doing the same thing. One man fired RPGs, the two men to either side of him concentrating their fire on the thrown fighters as they scrambled to their feet.
The firefight raged on for ninety blistering minutes.
The now-diminished enemy forces showed little sign of retreat, continuing to pour it on. Brock thought he was in one of those battles where the bad guys just kept turning the volume up, and it was getting louder and louder. They had at least three or four KIAs inside the redoubt now, and many more wounded still standing at their stations. Brock began to wonder how much longer they could withstand this withering assault.
And then the brave little man to his left, Patoo, was killed, the incoming round tearing away most of his throat, blood spouting out in gouts as he lay sprawled on his back on the ground, no chance. The militiamen had lost their brother and leader.
Brock saw Hawke register Patoo's death, saw the devastated look on his face. And then Hawke was going about inside the circle, walking right through the hail of bullets whistling across the compound at head height, encouraging Patoo's men to stand up to their duty and not let the bastards whip them. He never once sheltered his own person, and Harry could not see how he escaped being killed.
Hawke was one of the bravest men he'd ever seen in a fight and he'd seen one hell of a lot of brave men.
'Harry!' Stoke shouted. 'Above you!'
Brock whirled around to see a Talib fighter standing atop the berm with a sword in his hand, a demonic look on his face, and clearly ready to relieve Harry of his head. Guy must have crawled on his belly up to the berm when Brock was kneeling and reloading, trying to comfort the dying Patoo at the same time. No time to get his rifle up, so he whipped his sidearm out of the holster on his thigh and brought it to bear on the man just as the sword blade started its deadly arc toward him.
He shot the guy in the face, causing him to drop his sword and pitch backward onto the blood-soaked sand.
When Harry got back to his feet, he saw an amazing thing.
The enemy seemed to be withdrawing. They had taken severe casualties, had probably lost more than half their original force, and it looked like the bad guys didn't like the heat and were getting out of the kitchen. At least, temporarily.
'Keep firing until they're out of range,' Hawke said to Stokely, before expending an entire mag at full auto on the retreating foe. 'Then use sniper sights and see what you can do to the rear guard.'
Brock said, between bursts of automatic fire, 'A good victory, I'd say, chief. How the hell did we survive that?'
Hawke, reloading, said grimly, 'Right. Another victory like that one and we'll all be dirt-napping throughout eternity, Harry. We are now officially in what we used to call in the Royal Navy, 'the Deep Severe.''
'What do you think, boss?' Stoke said, pausing to reload. Then he saw Hawke had his radio out and was desperately trying to raise somebody, anybody, to come to their aid. 'Bloody thing doesn't work! We're in a dead zone,' he said, and he threw the radio to the ground in frustration, before regaining his composure.
'They'll be back,' Hawke said, still firing at the last of the retreating enemy. 'They're only nursing their wounds, regathering for the next assault. Pausing to regroup and replenish their ammunition. The commander, Zazi, if he's still alive, is at this moment coming up with a new strategy of attack.'
'Well, we can hold them off,' Brock said, trying to convince himself.
'I don't think so, Harry. We're still seriously outnumbered. If I were Colonel Zazi, I'd be telling the troops to bunch the horses up flank to flank, charge straight at us, en masse, and simply overrun our position.'
'Yeah, that'd probably work.'
'Harry, listen up. I don't know how much time we've got before they come back at us. Here's what I want you to do. These radios are useless. You've still got the sat-phone satchel? Tell me it's not all shot up?'
'Right here. Looks intact, I think.'
'You need to take it and leave the compound. Right now. Go to the top of that dune, set it up, and try to call in some help. You may not raise anybody, but you've got to try, it's the only chance we've got. The B-52s just across the border in Afghani airspace can't help from that altitude, but if they could send in a nearby AC-130 gunship from over there, we might get through this. You'll get a lot of bureaucratic crap about invading Pakistan airspace. Don't listen. Give them our approximate position and the strength of the enemy and tell them just how bloody serious this is. Tell them we've got our guys dying out here…we need help before we get overwhelmed. Go, Harry, go. Godspeed.'
HARRY BROCK, AT THE TOP of the giant sand dune, set the range finder next to the satellite phone in the sand beside him. He pulled out his map and spread it out, using the spidery legs of the sat phone to keep the map from blowing away. Then he looked out across the valley they had passed through. He looked to the mountains on either side, their prominent features, the way they funneled down to their present position, matched that with where they'd built their defensive perimeter. He could still see the old British fort in the hazy distance. He absorbed it all, creating a map in his mind.
Then he looked down at his real map, transposing the features in his mind on to the elevation lines fanned across the paper. He did this many times, looking back and forth between the valley and the map until he located the position on the paper that matched the features he saw with his eyes until he had a fix on their position. He pulled out his small spiral notebook and wrote down the position's grid coordinates. These would be the numbers he would radio up to anyone he could raise and-
He heard a clink of metal and grabbed his weapon. Five armed Taliban fighters were just starting the long climb up the dune.
MINUTES LATER HAWKE HEARD the rattle of heavy automatic weapon fire coming from the direction where Harry had disappeared behind the dune. At least three or four weapons firing simultaneously. Hawke figured Harry had surprised a Taliban squad mounting the back face of the dune on foot. Planning to use the dune's elevation to fire down into the redoubt.
Harry was probably dead.
And no help was on the way.
They'd stand alone.
ONE HOUR LATER THE ENEMY force returned with a vengeance, riding en masse, just the way Hawke had predicted. He'd pulled every man who could still fight to the forward rim of the circle facing the onslaught. Stokely had patched up the wounded militia guys and now, God only knew how, they were back on their feet at the ramparts. They all started firing RPGs the instant the Taliban horsemen got within range, eleven hundred meters. It had some effect, a lot of horses went down, but it was not nearly enough to even slow the charge.
'Full auto,' Hawke shouted up and down the line. 'Keep pouring fire into them, throw as much lead out there as you possibly can.'
And they did, but still the enemy kept coming, and their intentions were clear. They would simply roll right over the flimsy fortification. Then wheel, return, and kill every single one of them with blades or bullets.
Hawke looked over at Sahira, firing her weapon with an intensity he'd never imagined she was capable of. Abdul Dakkon stood beside her, cleanly picking off anyone directing fire in their direction. Hawke called her name and she looked over at him.
He shook his head and mouthed the words, I'm so sorry.
He saw the tears rolling down her cheeks and his heart broke and once again he felt that stabbing-
'Look! The top of the dune!' he heard Stokely shout. 'Holy mother of God, will you just take a look at that!'
